Born John Whitney Stillman inside 1952 and raised in the upstate New York town of Cornwall, Stillman was the boy of an impoverished debutante from Philadelphia and a Democratic politician from Washington D.C. Stillman graduated from Harvard in 1973 and started out as a journalist in Manhattan, New York. Inside 1980 he met and married his Spanish wife while on an assignment within Barcelona, where he was introduced to a bit of film producers from Madrid and persuaded them that he may sell their films to Spanish-language television in the U.S. He worked for the next pack years around Barcelona & Madrid as a sales agent for directors Fernando Trueba and Fernando Colomo, and every now and againside acted in their films, unremarkably swimming comical Americans, like his role in Trueba's Sal Gorda.

Stillman wrote a screenplay for Metropolitan between 1984 and 1988 while running an illustrating professional within Up to date York, & financed a film from either either a issue of selling his flat for $50,000 besides when contributions from friends & relatives. It tells a story of the rise & fall of the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, a little class action of Ivy League Manhattanites making the cycles at deb balls in the period of Christmas break of their first season within college.

Barcelona, his number one studio financed film, was inspired by his have lives within Spain in a period of the early 1980s. Stillman has described a film as An Officer and a Gentleman, but by owning a title on to ii men like than of these. These deuce men, Ted & Fred, have experience the awkwardness of existence taken with around a foreign united states unfeeling & politically opposed to their own. Serendipitously, one of a films's stars, Taylor Nichols, met during production the Spanish woman he late married, very much like Stillman got done years prior to.

A Doomsday of Disco was loosely according to Stillman's travels & lives inside various nightclubs in Manhattan, & possibily at a Studio 54. Very much prefer Metropolitan, the film deals by owning a class action of Ivy League & Amherst Manhattanites, recently graduated from college & law school, falling in & away from love in the urban environment of the late 1970s disco scene.

Stillman protagonists voice admiration for Charles Fourier, Jane Austen, and Samuel Johnson. His films, correspondingly, indicate an interest in a rise & fall of eleemosynary social situations, the expression & alteration of human being vice and virtue, & a influence upon these trends exercised by culture and a cultured.

His Manhattan-depending, mannerist comedies use at times been in comparison a films of Hal Hartley and Noah Baumbach.